In the seven episodes of his Showtime series Who is America?Sacha Baron Cohen played a series of characters thrown into meeting real people, and served up some of the year's finest laughs, even as he charged into dealing with chilling alt-right subjects who were all too quick to demonstrate their racism, homophobia…
Hail to the almost chief. Vice, the film that transformed Christian Bale into various incarnations of George W. Bush’s former VeepDick Cheney, scored the Oscar tonight for Best Makeup and Hairstyling. It’s the fourth Academy Award for makeup designer Greg Cannom and the first for his fellow Vice winners Kate Biscoe…
When it came to constructing a biopic about former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, “the lynchpin of the entire movie is Lynne Cheney” asserts Vice filmmaker Adam McKay.
“One of the tricks we ran up against in this film was according to the Syd Field-McKee kind of model of storytelling, Dick Cheney doesn’t have a…
A column chronicling conversations and events on the awards circuit
As usual the town, joined this particular year by the US government, has shut down for the week between Christmas and New Year’s day, and we can assume Oscar voters are busily watching screeners wherever they are for the break, from holiday…
No one might have been asking for it, but Oscar winner Adam McKay has turned the season into a Dick Cheney Christmas. As he also showed with The Big Short, writer-director McKay has evolved into one of the best cinematic satirists we have seen this side of Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges. Choosing the life and…
After honing the difficult craft of creating laughs with characters embedded in situations where only he is in a comedy in Da Ali G Show, Borat and Bruno, Sacha Baron Cohen turned his skill toward exposing highbrow politicians and hard line conservatives with a coterie of new characters in Who Is America? For his…
Last time Adam McKay crashed the Oscar party with The Big Short, his inventive dissection of the meltdown of the global economy in 2008 got a Best Picture nomination and McKay's first Oscar for script. He's back with the latecomer Vice, cleverly mixing humor and inventive narrative techniques to show how Dick Cheney…
A day after the state funeral of President George H.W. Bush, the Dick Cheney biopic Vice leads all films with six nominations for the 76th annual Golden Globe Awards. It was a jarring backdrop but Vice has seemingly lived on the edge of history throughout its journey to the screen, according to producer Kevin…
Sacha Baron Cohen has been nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actor in a TV series Musical or Comedy for the coterie of characters he played in the satirical interview series Who Is America? While some will read into this that his inclusion in the series and not limited series category means that…
EXCLUSIVE: Many directors can believe they put their hearts into their movies, but on Vice, Adam McKay came closer than most any of them. Similar to Dick Cheney — whose trouble with heart attacks before he finally got a heart transplant are well known — McKay suffered a heart attack during the making of the film. And…
One of the last shoes to drop in this year’s Oscar race just dropped.
Annapurna skipped the Fall Festival circuit and decided instead to take over the Bruin Theatre in Westwood today to put Adam McKay’s Vice (just finished a couple of days ago) out to the world. Judging by the reaction to this afternoon’s…
Christian Bale is known for his protean performances and a willingness to make physical sacrifices for his craft. In preparation for his title role in 2004 indie film The Machinist, just one of many examples, the actor shed more than 60 pounds.
In Adam McKay’s Vice, Bale heads the opposite direction, adding…